Identify the Why and the How Will Be Easier

New Year's Resolutions are easier to keep if you ask yourself "why?"

Assistant professor Julia Belyavsky Bayuk is in the department of business administration at the University of Delaware, and her recent research was published in the Journal of Consumer Research. But though she was presumably researching consumer behavior (i.e. saving money), her findings have implications for the success of our annual ritual failure, the New Year's Resolution.

What Bayuk's research found was that when it comes to reaching goals, we're better off keeping our eye on the "why" rather than the "how."

While common wisdom tells us that we should plan the work and work the plan, what this appears to do is narrow our vision to only one route to success--The Plan--blinding us to other possible means to the end.

I'd been mulling a New Year's post a while, thinking about resolutions that might be appropriate here. Of course, the overall goal is to live our lives with integrity, to be true to ourselves.

That can come with a lot of sub-resolutions: I resolve not to let others guilt me into doing things they enjoy but that sound like hell to me. I resolve to assert my right to keep my mouth shut when I feel like it. I resolve not to drink myself loud when what I really want is just to go home and be quiet.

OK. So consider Bayuk's research and we'll come at it from another direction. If the "why" is that we want to be true to ourselves, then we have to push back against outside forces that insist we be true to their perception of who we must be. You know: family, friends, even those counterproductive voices in our heads that tell us that our way is wrong.

So keeping our overarching "why" in mind, let's also drill down to some case-by-case whys--persuasive arguments to use with yourself when your resolve weakens.

Because you've had all of that kind of fun you need. Because you've spoken to everyone you want to and feel you've done the job. Because you're sleepy. Because you would prefer not to drink anymore. Because you don't want to witness drunken friends behaving badly.

Because you're doing something and don't want to be interrupted. Because you're not in the mood. Because if it's important they'll leave a message, text, or e-mail. Because nobody has the right to disrupt your day.

Because they don't know what it's like to be you. Because you don't need anyone's approval to be who you are. Because insisting you be someone you are not is inappropriate, and it's polite to ignore them, just as you would any other social gaffe.

You get the drift. We all have situations where we know what we want to do and more or less how to do it, but get lost trying to justify it in the face of social pressure--in the arguments others present to support their whys.

You can resolve all you want, but resolutions without clear motivation go nowhere. Identify the whys and the hows should follow.

The 'why' is so frequently left out of every situation in our lives. As we drift further and further from the actual meaning and purpose of our actions, our relationships, our institutions etc...we have no idea what a real solution might look like!

I am in the field of education and I see every day how distant we are from the question 'why do we have education'. If we could answer this, all of the pieces would fall into place.

Good thoughts. Getting stuck on the process of exercising rather than the pleasant thoughts of achieving the goal of losing weight is associating the pain of changing one's lifestyle in order to achieve the resolution. Losing weight and quitting smoking are two of the most vocalized resolutions and also the most difficult.

Sometimes though, the Why of a goal can be to avoid the pain of not achieving the goal and be more motivating than the perceived feelings of the achievement. This is like removing the pain of having that which you despise rather than the resolution of wanting to have something you do not possess.